So chafing, he could not fit himself in here. Sometimes he said to himself that it was all in his mind, that men and women, work and pleasure were the same anywhere. Only he couldn’t make that a reality for himself in Seattle. Such pleasures as he sought only made him sad. Life flowed about him in a surging stream and he was like a chip in the swirls. He had laid that feeling of loneliness, that depressing sense of isolation, to being a stranger, to living under a sodden, weeping sky that never cleared to let him see the blue. He had never known anything but brightness, air that was crystal-clear, a look that swept to a far horizon. Here the eyes were in a prison, shut in by streets like canyons, miles of houses monotonously alike, dark dripping forests that began where the last suburban cottages lifted among the raw stumps where logging outfits had taken their toll of the great trees. Robin had said to himself that when he knew people, when spring came, it would be different. It _was_ different. But the difference took the form of a more acute nostalgia. Robin had never wandered among the poets, but he knew spring fever and he was learning in bitterness of heart the meaning of homesickness. He turned now to face the city rising above him in terraced avenues. Smoke from ten thousand chimneys cast a haze against the soft blue sky. The rustle and noise and confusion had stilled a little, though not wholly, on this day of rest. There was a transient hush along the water front. An atmospheric beauty hovered upon the Sound. The Olympics stood out blue toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Yet the city faced Robin like a maelstrom from which he desired to be afar. He was sick with a subtle sorrow. The medicine to cure him was a good horse between his legs, a look from some high ridge out over a hundred miles of grassland all green now and sprinkled with blue windflowers. There would be mountains in the distance too; clean, upstanding peaks like Gothic cathedrals rising, as the Sweet Grass and the Bear Paws rose, abruptly from the level of the great plains. The sharp smell of bruised sage, the white tents of a round-up camp in a creek bottom, the howl of a wolf far off in the night--these Robin’s heart suddenly ached for--and for something else, that he felt deep within him but would never admit. “By God, I’ve a mind to go back and face the music!” he said aloud. “They can’t hang me. I’d as soon spend two or three years in Deer Lodge as here.” Of so little value did freedom seem to him in that moment. There was more than homesickness. A man’s liberty is dear but so is pride. Only cowards fled the field. He hadn’t fought a rear guard action. For four months that inner sense of shame had been slowly accumulating in Robin. All that he cared about, his little cosmos in its entirety, lay under the shadow of the Bear Paws. He had been stampeded into flight from a danger real enough, but which he should have faced.